Can anyone recommend a good FireWire enclosure? I have a 10-gig Maxtor 3.5-inch drive (my iMac's original 10 GB HD) I want to put into it. I read somewhere (I think on Ars) that I should look for an "Oxford 911 bridge"???<br><br>This comes up because my 30-gig Maxtor that's in my iMac now is starting to make some loud clunking noises before it starts up, and I fear it's the beginning of its death throes. Time for some heavy-duty backup.<br><br>

firewiredirect.com and firewiredepot.com are the two biggest sellers of FW enclosures as far as I'm aware.<br><br>both sell the kit with the oxford "bridge" but I'd double check the description to make certain. wherever you read it you read correctly. the improved technology from Granite (granite.com?) increases throughput from an average of 16-18mb/sec for first generation FW to 34-38mb/sec for the oxford bridge. all a "bridge" is (layman's explanation which is all I understand) is the electronics which runs the drive and communicates, over the same FW cables as first generation, with the mac.<br><br>any ATA(IDE) drive will work. i used to be on mailing list for both vendors but haven't been paying attention to price lately. it should be in the $80-$120 range including box et al (although double check to make certain you get a FW cable if you don't have one....Granite FW cables are top quality but cost around 3X as much as "standard" quality which run about ten bucks each.)<br><br>sorry to hear about noise of your 30GB. <br><br>FW is great for backup. i have 2 FW drives i use with Retrospect using the "duplicate" command and you have a consistent mirror backup. using "restore" command you'll only run into 3 or 4 apps, usually utilities like cc8 or cc9, which won't provide a perfect restore.<br><br>with Retrospect consider the fact that you can also backup partitions to folders (any volume to any other volume, stay a whole drive to a folder) so if you have more than 8 or 9 GB of data on the 30GB drive you can selectively backup on the folders you can't afford to lose.<br><br>noises from hard drives are never easy to diagnose. it shouldn't be that old i would guess and it simply may be going through "growth pains" before getting it's second breath. <br><br>128k_Mac<br><br>The box said "Requires Microsoft Windows or better" so I bought a Macintosh.

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